The Wisdom of Psychopaths (29 page)

In moments of flow, the past and the future evaporate as abstractions. All that remains is an intense, uncanny, attention-devouring present, an overwhelming feeling of being “in the zone.” This is the union, the enchanted consummation, of mind, body, and game: what’s known in the trade as the “Golden Triangle” of performance, a trance-like state of effortless action and reaction, where time and self converge—and one is in control, but not in control, at the same time.

It has a telltale neural signature in the brain.

In 2011, Martin Klasen at Aachen University discovered that moments of flow possess a unique physiological profile. Using fMRI to observe the brains of video game players in action, he found that periods of heightened focus and concentration are accompanied by a reduction of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex—the brain’s error-detection and conflict-monitoring hardware—indicative of an increase in attention and the suppression of distracting and non-task-relevant information.

But that’s not all. A similar pattern has also been found in the brains of criminal psychopaths.

In the same year that Klasen was playing video games, Kent Kiehl dusted off that eighteen-wheel fMRI juggernaut of his and hit the roads of New Mexico armed with a new experiment. Kiehl was interested in what, precisely, makes psychopaths tick when it comes to moral decision making. Are they really ice-cold under pressure? Are they really better at coming up with the goods when the chips are down and time is of the essence? If so, why? Could it possibly be something that’s hardwired into their brains? A triumph of cold-blooded cognitive reasoning over warm-blooded emotional processing?

To find out, he presented psychopaths and non-psychopaths with
two different types of moral dilemmas: what he termed “high-conflict (personal)” and “low-conflict (personal)” dilemmas, respectively, examples of both of which follow.
²

Enemy soldiers have taken over your village. They have orders to kill everyone they find. You and some others are hiding in a basement. You hear the soldiers enter the house above you. Your baby begins to cry loudly. You cover his mouth to block the sound. If you remove your hand from his mouth he will cry loudly and the soldiers will hear. If they hear the baby they will find you and kill everyone, including you and your baby. To save yourself and the others, you must smother your baby to death.

Is it morally acceptable for you to smother your child in order to save yourself and the other people?

You are visiting your grandmother for the weekend. Usually she gives you a gift of a few dollars when you arrive, but this time she doesn’t. You ask her why not and she says something about how you don’t write her as many letters as you used to. You get angry and decide to play a trick on her.

You take some pills from the medicine cabinet and put them in your grandmother’s teapot, thinking that this will make her very sick.

Is it morally acceptable for you to put pills in your grandmother’s teapot in order to play a trick on her?

—————

The prediction was simple. If psychopaths were less fazed by the extraneous emotional exigencies of the moment and had the cold, hard edge over the rest of us when it came to life-and-death decision making, then the most marked difference between their performance and that of the non-psychopaths, Kiehl surmised, should manifest itself when it came to the high-conflict (personal) dilemmas—when the heat is turned up to max and the problem is closest to home. This, it turned out, is exactly what he found (see
figure 6.1
).

Figure 6.1. Psychopaths are less morally squeamish—but only when playing for high stakes. (Adapted from Ermer et al., 2011)

In the high-conflict scenarios, the psychopaths did, indeed, rate a significantly greater number of utilitarian judgments as “morally acceptable” than the non-psychopaths. They were better at smothering babies, or at least dealing with the pain of such an action, than their more ethically squeamish counterparts. And presumably they would be better at staying alive, and preserving the lives of their fellow basement stowaways, were the scenarios to play out for real.

But there was more. Just as I had found with the
William Brown
example in
chapter 3
, Kiehl and his coworkers also discovered that the psychopaths, as well as having fewer moral hygiene issues in general than the non-psychopaths, took considerably less time to evaluate the conundrums put in front of them. They were quicker at reaching a decision as to the appropriate course of action. Not only that, but such attenuated response times were accompanied, just as Martin Klasen had found under conditions of flow, by reduced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex.

But—and here’s the rub—only when it came to the high-conflict scenarios. In the case of the low-conflict dilemmas, the deliberative differential disappeared. Psychopaths were just as likely to veto the idea of putting pills in your grandmother’s teapot as the non-psychopaths.

The conclusion seems pretty clear. When the stakes are high and backs are against the wall, it’s a psychopath you want alongside you. But if there’s nothing to play for and you’re on an even keel, forget it. Psychopaths switch off, and take just as much time getting the show on the road as the rest of us.

Indeed, EEG studies have revealed consistent differences in the way that the brains of psychopaths and non-psychopaths respond to tasks and situations that are either highly interesting or highly motivating, respectively. When the handwriting’s on the wall, psychopaths show significantly greater activation in the left prefrontal regions of their brains (the area directly behind the left forehead) compared to non-psychopaths—cerebral asymmetry associated with considerable reduction in anxiety, enhanced positive affect, increased focusing of attention, and orientation to reward. And also, it would seem, with elevated spiritual states.
The neuroscientist Richard Davidson, at the University of Wisconsin, has discovered precisely the same profile in elite Buddhist monks, the spiritual Olympians of the High Himalayas, while they’re immersed in deep meditation.

“
There is a lot of evidence [to suggest] that the best sportsmen and women have [developed] psychological skills that allow them to concentrate and to control anxiety,” explains Tim Rees, a sports psychologist
at the University of Exeter. Moreover, he adds, “there is also a lot of evidence to show that, once someone gets to a certain level of skill, it is the differences in their psychological approach that differentiates people at the very top.”

The mind-set that separates the great from the good, and as Kent Kiehl showed us, in some critical situations, the living from the dead, is inherently psychopathic in nature.

And also inherently spiritual.

The link made by Csíkszentmihályi and others between “staying in the present” and the absence of anxiety is, of course, hardly new. The practice of “right mindfulness,” for example, constitutes the seventh step of the Noble Eightfold Path, one of the principal teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, some two and a half thousand years ago.

In his book
The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering
, Bhikkhu Bodhi, a monk of the Theravada tradition, describes what the practice entails:

“
The mind is deliberately kept at the level of
bare attention
, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event. All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped.”

According to the Mahāsatipatthāna Sutta, one of the core discourses in the Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism, such training, consistently applied, eventually leads to “the arising of insight and the qualities of dispassion, non-clinging, and release.”

Qualities, as we’ve seen, that psychopaths appear to possess naturally.

But the similarities between the Western, psychopathic mentality and the transcendental mind-sets of the East don’t end there. More recently, psychologists such as Mark Williams at the University of
Oxford—who, if you recall, we met in the previous chapter—and the aforementioned Richard Davidson have begun the innovative, integrative, though empirically demanding process of harnessing the restorative properties of Buddhist meditation practices within a more systematized, therapeutic, and clinically oriented framework.

So far it seems to be working.

Mindfulness-based intervention, as we saw a little earlier, has been shown to be a particularly effective metacognitive strategy when dealing with the symptoms of anxiety and depression … two conditions that psychopaths are singularly immune to.

The fundamental principles of the therapy, as one would expect, are heavily derivative of the traditional Buddhist teachings already outlined. But there’s an added ingredient, a kind of naive, childlike inquisitiveness, which is strongly reminiscent of the core “openness to experience” factor of the Big Five personality structure that we explored in
chapter 2
. And which psychopaths, if you recall, score very high on.

“
The first component [of mindfulness] involves the self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience,” explains psychiatrist Scott Bishop in one of the seminal papers on the subject back in 2004, “thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental events in the present moment. The second component involves adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance.”

Or, as the Zen Buddhist masters of the martial arts would say,
shoshin
: “beginner’s mind.”

“
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” elucidated Shunryu Suzuki, one of the most celebrated Buddhist teachers of recent times. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”

And few would disagree. When Dickens decided to send Scrooge the ghosts of the past, present, and future, he chose the three specters that haunt all of us. But anchor your thoughts entirely in the present, screen out the chatter of the querulous, recriminative past and the elusive, importunate future, and anxiety begins to subside. Perception begins to sharpen. And the question becomes one of utility: what we do
with this ‘now’, this enormous, emphatic present, once we have it. Do we “savor” the moment like a saint? Or “seize” it like a psychopath? Do we reflect on the nature of experience? Or do we focus our attention entirely on ourselves in the frenetic pursuit of instant gratification?

Several years ago, as I documented in
Split-Second Persuasion
, I traveled to a remote monastery in Japan in search of the answer to a mystery. The mystery in question concerned a test: a test undertaken by those on the rarefied spiritual ice fields of the higher martial arts.

The test involves one man kneeling down—arms by his side, blindfolded—while another man stands behind him with a samurai sword raised directly above his head. At a moment of his choosing, unbeknownst to his vulnerable adversary, the man standing behind will unleash the sword onto the kneeling man’s frame, causing injury, probably death. Unless, that is, the blow is somehow deflected. And the swordsman then disarmed.

Such an undertaking appears impossible. And yet it isn’t. The test I have just described is real: an ancient, exquisitely choreographed ritual, carried out in secret, unfathomable dojos in Japan and the High Himalayas, that those approaching greatness—those spectral mind whisperers miles above the black belt—routinely undergo.

These days, mercifully, the sword is made of plastic. But there was a time, long before the days of health and safety, when it was the real thing.

A shadowy sensei, well into his eighties, revealed the secret: “One must empty one’s mind totally,” he told me, as we sat cross-legged in a garden of clouds and lilac, deep in the ancient beech forests of the Tanzawa Mountains. “One must focus purely on the now. When one enters a state like that, one is able to smell time. To feel its waves washing over one’s senses. The tiniest ripple may be detected over great distances. And the signal intercepted. Often it appears that the two combatants move simultaneously. But this is not so. It is not difficult. With practice it can be mastered.”

Reading back over what the ancient sensei told me, I’m strongly reminded of the words of the psychopathic neurosurgeon we encountered in
chapter 4
. Of course, I hadn’t met him by the time I went to
Japan. But if I had, I would’ve recounted his description of how he sometimes feels before a difficult operation with great alacrity to my host. And the old man, in his monastic black
hakama
and blood-red kimono, would’ve smiled. The surgeon’s account of the mental state he calls “supersanity”—an “altered state of consciousness that feeds on precision and clarity”—appears very similar to the frame of mind that the sensei was talking about: the mind state that must be entered into by the kneeling, blindfolded time-sommelier to disarm his sword-wielding assailant.